Friday, October 19, 2012

In continuing to explore
C.-F. Ramuz, I turned to an earlier novel with a later, greater theme, again succinctly
contained in its title: The End of All Men. If When the Mountain Fell
had, in its treatment of a particular calamity, provided an oblique but chillingly
portentous and powerful suggestion of the cataclysm of Nazism and war about to
engulf Europe, then The End of All Men should frighten the hell out of
contemporary readers: its subject is the unstoppable warming of the world.
Though the novel was written in 1927, there has probably been no other work
since that has so effectively and devastatingly painted a picture of the
catastrophe of climate change.

Of course, Ramuz in 1927
was hardly addressing human-made warming of the planet. As in When the
Mountain Fell, Ramuz melds Christian allegory and natural forces, here the
prediction in Revelations of the destruction of the world by fire, and
inspired, as we infer from the dedication, by a torrid summer in which it
seemed the world would never stop getting hotter. His plainspoken vision of
such an end to the earth has little to do with today’s complex scientific
projections of the interacting mechanisms of warming with which we’re now
familiar: the terrifying myriad of potential attendant consequences ranging from
rising sea levels to disastrous weather, from disruptions in food supply to release
of gases trapped in frozen tundra, from eruptions of disease to cascading
ecological effects stemming from alterations in species vitality and survival. Scientists
intent on communicating their alarm might learn from Ramuz, as what appears to
be a trademark Ramuz ability to convey ideas grandly but in simply understandable
terms makes The End of All Men as straightforward and easy to grasp as a
Biblical parable.

Simply put, something
has occurred, some perturbation of the earth that sends it slowly spiraling
closer to the sun, with the temperature rising gradually each day. The first
wave of hot days and the first rumors of something wrong get shrugged off:

There
is a slight beginning of nothing here, without any outward sign. In the
beginning the inventor of the idea is all alone with his idea. The arriving
news gets a reception only of inattention and smiles.

Denial gives way to
fear, then to panic, desperation, and violence. The strategies for dealing with
the heat grow increasingly frantic. Riots break out. Refugees pile onto ships headed
for the poles, only to be repulsed by icebergs splintered from the icecaps. In
ever-shrinking lakes, people seek solace in whatever coolness remains in whatever
water remains. Finding relief in no cardinal direction, others look vertically
and head for the high mountains, for what would a Ramuz novel be without the
Swiss Alps?

Like When the
Mountain Fell, The End of All Men is set near Lake Geneva in
French-speaking Switzerland. Ramuz displays a remarkable ability to be both
regional and universal, to move seamlessly from the particular to the general. Large
portions of The End of All Men could be lifted out of context and
understood in any setting, as though Ramuz has found a way to some “ur” essence
of phenomena. Even concrete and precise descriptions appeal to a commonality of
experience, as when Ramuz juggles singular and plural in describing the
discomfort of attempting to sleep in the heat:

That
night the stars were too many and too white. Everybody remains merely
questioning; everything is stopped. Everywhere, they lie naked on their beds;
they toss from left to right, seeking a place for their head. Naked, having taken
off their uncomfortable shirts, but there is that other discomfort which is in the
air, and which is the atmosphere. Every man argues for himself – continually
repelling something he would like to push aside, and it is himself, his own
skin, as he is made, the very threat he is to himself; pushing it with each
hand, with the two feet, by slow or abrupt movements.

Stylistically, The
End of All Men is more experimental than When the Mountain Fell,
more a prose poem than novel, a meditation on death, on human interactions in
face of calamity, on moral choices when faced with mortality, on communal
choices when faced with doom. Characters have no time to develop – rather,
anyone given a name in the novel merely seems to detach from the masses for a
brief, distinct moment, a brief act, then disappears, a moth in a flame. And
yet the cadence of Ramuz’s language, his moving, gentle and even forgiving
portrayal of human beings faced with apocalypse, convey an ultimate faith in
human dignity, in effort, in life being worth living. The powerful ending of The
End of All Men seems to anticipate as its deceptively reassuring
philosophical core those lines from T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” that “the
end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place
for the first time” – rather cold
comfort for a world reduced to ashes.

Friday, October 5, 2012

At a book sale last week
I picked up a novel on impulse, having never heard of its author, Charles-Ferdinand
Ramuz, and drawn by its curious title, When the Mountain Fell. Given
that title, a blurb on the jacket from French dramatist Paul Claudel calling the
book “one of the summits of French prose” both piqued my interest and caused
one of my irony receptors to flash for an irreverent moment. Having now read When
the Mountain Fell, and putting aside its being in translation rather than in
its original 1935 French incarnation, Derborence, I’m inclined to trust
that Claudel’s statement is no exaggeration. At home late that night, I opened
the book expecting to have a quick look; two hours later I emerged from this
exquisite novel as though from a trance. Ramuz’s captivating narrative style is
completely compelling; his descriptions of the Swiss Alps in which his story
unfolds are ravishing; his grasp of the ways people grapple with disaster
displays a profound sensitivity and understanding; the ending of the novel
still rings in my mind days later with a precise, poignant, crystalline beauty.

As a title, When the
Mountain Fell, even if it’s not Ramuz’s own, sums up the novel succinctly.
This is a simple story of catastrophe and human response to it, based on an actual
event, a colossal landslide in the early 18th century in Derborence,
in the French-speaking corner of Switzerland near the source of the Rhône,
which brought half of a mountain down onto the scattered seasonal cabins of herders
who had taken their livestock up to a mountain meadow to graze. The resulting
rock field dammed a stream and created a lake, spread debris for a distance of
five and half kilometers, and buried the area in rock to a depth estimated at
100 meters.

Ramuz focuses on the human
element of this catastrophe, the actions and reactions of the valley’s citizens
across a wide psychological spectrum, from resigned acceptance to abject grief
to madness, relating the landslide’s impact on individual lives as well as on
the community of the valley and beyond. His characters, simple country people, employ
a laconic, pared-down language that captures the essentiality of rural life, as
in the relationship between Antoine and Therese, the young newlyweds at the novel’s
center:

He
said, “hello”; she said, “hello.” He said “Well now…,” she said,” You see, it’s
like this.” They had to meet far from the village, because there were always
busybodies around.

This economy of language
that leaves a world of things unsaid remains unchanged even in the face of
disaster, as when men from neighboring villages and even from the
German-speaking side of the range converge on the site of the collapsed
mountain:

­­They
came. They said nothing at first. They came and said nothing. They looked at
the people from Zamperon who said nothing either. Then they nodded their heads
slowly.

And
they said, “Well?”

The
people from Zamperon said, “Yes,” and nodded their heads.

But the ostensible
simplicity of When the Mountain Fell masks far more complexity than
appears on its surface. Ramuz’s sentences are short. His paragraphs are short.
What he does within such constraints can be quietly dazzling. Frequently,
perspective shifts subtly between observer and observed, as when Therese, while
a storm rages outside, sits dazed within her home, grappling with a ghostly vision
she’s had of her husband, a scene we see from her eyes and, a split second
later, as though eyes have turned to look at her:

The
lightening flashed again. Suddenly there was a window opposite her in the
kitchen wall, then it was no longer there.

A
blinding white square, it sprang into being, vanished, flashed out again, and
with it Therese too was first brilliantly lighted, then swallowed up in
darkness , then lighted up again.

Ramuz’s sentences perform
similar acrobatics in delicately flipping perspective between interior thought
and exterior phenomena, or in juxtaposing elements that suggest, in the wake of
the calamity, consciousnesses struggling between extremes of belief and
disbelief, between profound anguish and the irreverent indifference of
particular material things latched onto in the mind’s desperate grasp for solidity
and succor. At times Ramuz replays, “Rashoman” style, an entire scene as viewed
first from one character’s perspective then from another’s, even aligning this
along a back and forth tension between the buried meadow up the mountain and
the women, children and elderly men left in the village below. Perspective
looks up the mountain then back down, as though strung along an invisible cord
binding the village to the disaster which has taken so many of the town’s most
vital men, as though to emphasize the empathic ways in which the living ache for
the dead, longing to identify, whether out of grief or hope, or out of both,
with those they love, with those they have lost.

The tremendous sense of
loss is amplified and thrown into sharp relief through Ramuz’s contrasting, rapturous
descriptions of the natural world. Beyond and above the sharp, cruel rocks,
everything seems divinely luminous and alive:

It
was as if they were standing at the bottom of a well, except that the steep
walls were fissured from top to bottom by narrow gorges, each with is tiny
waterfall hanging in a wavering white line. Their gaze swept evenly around the
rim, then halted where Serpahin’s forefinger still pointed at the sky.

It
was up there right on the edge of the parapet at its highest point. Just there
the rock jutted out into space, and towering along its whole width was the rim
of the glacier. Something up there was shining softly: a luminous fringe,
faintly transparent, with gleams of blue and green and a sheen like phosphorescence
– it was the broken edge of the ice, and in that enchanted hour of the night it
too was filled with infinite silence and infinite peace. Nothing stirred
anywhere under the impalpable white down of moonlight which seemed to drift
effortlessly on the night air and settle in thin sheets on every smooth
surface.

When the Mountain
Fell contains a few elements of
what in less adept hands I’d be tempted to call “Christian kitsch” – Bible
beams breaking through clefts in cliffs and clouds to illuminate polished
crosses, symbolic incarnations of good and evil, suggestions of Christian
allegory. But what Ramuz accomplishes, almost miraculously, is simply and
seamlessly to bring the reader inside the religiosity of the community he
describes, conveying how belief - or incredulity - can shape and constitute perception
of reality. Rather than imposing a theological vision, Ramuz simultaneously
keeps us outside as observers and inside as participants in the community’s
small, sincere rituals and gestures of faith, which have a particular poignancy
in the world he creates around his good people, a world actually at odds with a
reassuring God and where faith is, almost literally, teetering on an abyss. On
the surface When the Mountain Fell may appear an anachronism, out of
step literarily with a decade that gave birth to works of such striking
modernism as Celine’s Journey to the End of Night, Pessoa’s The Book
of Disquiet, Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Yet Ramuz’s story contains, in
addition to its subtle, controlled experiments with syntax and perspective, a canny
questioning of perception itself – throughout his novel there’s a delicate
infusion of dreams, hallucinations, visions, and superstitions capable of
altering reality – but above all a deep sense of existential indeterminacy and
of the indefinite and indefinable. A simple description of a precipice along a
mountain path contains all the power of an existential void:

And
suddenly the ground falls away from beneath your feet.

All
at once the line of grass against the sky, which dips slightly in the middle,
is outlining its hollow curve over nothingness itself. You have arrived. A
chasm opens abruptly below you, like an immense oval basket with precipitous
sides over which you have to lean, because although you are yourself six
thousand feet up, the bottom is seventeen or eighteen hundred feet below you,
straight down.

You
bend over, you lean your head forward a little. Or else lie down flat, and look
over the edge into the depths.

A
breath of cold air blows into your face.

In like manner, even the
descriptions of the rock field - “stones, and more stones, and still more
stones” - come across as both literal and conceptual, a “waste land” at once
geological and as existential as the one that gave a title to T. S. Eliot's poem. Everything in When the Mountain Fell works to suggest a grandeur of
existence far beyond the intimacy of the place and time; Ramuz's story could take
place as easily in 1935 as in the early 18th century. This lends When
the Mountain Fell an eternal, allegorical quality, and, in the context of when
it was written, a deeply sensitive prescience. If the minimalist speech of the
mountain people carries within it a world of meaning and understanding, then so
does Ramuz’s ostensibly simple narrative. For such a small book, it seems vast
and echoing, radiating out from that instant of catastrophe as though touching
all the world’s catastrophes. And, though the calamitous events in a small,
peaceful, Swiss mountain village in the 18th century seem at first
far removed from the tumultuous period in which When the Mountain Fell
was written, no other novel I’ve read from the time has seemed to communicate so profoundly
an anticipation of the imminent catastrophe facing 1930's Europe, of the mountain about to fall on it.